


Pictures

by Belphegor



Series: Carnahan-O'Connells musings and snapshots [1]
Category: The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), The Mummy Series
Genre: Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 13:13:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21300011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Belphegor/pseuds/Belphegor
Summary: The manor that used to be Evy’s and Jonathan’s family’s house and is now Rick’s home is full of paintings and photos, some of people he’s never ever heard about, some that tell an ongoing story.A walk through a house and a family in pictures.
Series: Carnahan-O'Connells musings and snapshots [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1557865
Comments: 18
Kudos: 56





	Pictures

Rick doesn’t have any photo of his parents – or himself, come to think of it, until after he met Evy. Sometimes he wishes he did.

It’s a little weird, sometimes, living in a house that has so many unknown faces in it. Paintings, chromolitographs, pictures from the early age of photography, you name it. There’s a lot of souvenirs from Evy’s parents’ journeys, too, but what intrigues Rick the most are the portraits. Especially since there are so many family members he’s never even heard about.

There’s even a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte upstairs. Rick might know more about treasure than history, but even he knows that that man’s face in an English home is a little out of place.

“Oh, yes,” Jonathan said when he mentioned it in passing. “Courtesy of our great-great-uncle Archibald. Admired the old bogeyman a great deal, the quaint old fellow did. Most of the Carnahans have been odd ducks at worst and charmingly eccentric at best. Though not enough to care for more, er… unconventional additions to the family, apparently.” Then he’d gotten real quiet, cleared his throat, and hastily changed the subject.

Evy told Rick her parents’ respective families were none too pleased by their union. Rick, knowing his wife’s knack for understatement, took it to mean it was a shitstorm of massive proportions, one of those earthquakes that can either destroy or make a family – or both. From what he gathered, Evy’s and Jonathan’s father was the second or third son, and as such was left free to explore both a career in academia and lands almost everybody he knew had only read about in books. He was set to inherit more than the house and a stipend, sizeable though it was, but once he married Salwa al-Masri his entire family pretty much turned their backs on him.

On their English side, Evy and Jonathan have three uncles, four aunts, and a number of cousins they’ve never seen and barely even heard about for some of them. Most didn’t even show up for her parents’ funeral. This Evy told Rick only once, late in the night, while they were still discovering each other outside and inside, in a flat voice that didn’t sound like her and cut to Rick’s heart worse than if she had been crying.

Their cousins’ faces are nowhere to be found in the house. Apart from pictures of Evy and Jonathan as kids, the portraits stop at John Carnahan’s generation.

There is exactly one photograph, slightly faded and frayed at the edges but lovingly kept in a frame shielded from direct light, of a young Salwa and her immediate family: a man, a woman, three girls, and a boy. Evy’s mother must be all of fifteen in this one, but the first time Rick saw the picture he had no trouble at all picking her from her sisters. She had Evy’s heart-shaped face, Jonathan’s slightly slanted eyes, and the crooked grin Alex later inherited from his mother’s side. Her family cut ties with her, as well, so thoroughly that when the time came to notify them of her death, none of them could be found despite Evy’s and Jonathan’s best efforts.

Rick’s parents didn’t have siblings, and neither does he. When the O’Connells moved from Chicago to Cairo and his parents died two years later, he found himself completely alone in the world. By blood alone, Evy and Jonathan should have an enormous family, uncles, aunts, cousins and grand-cousins all over the place from Surrey to Scotland to Lower Egypt; but it quickly became evident to Rick that, once their parents died, they were virtually as alone as he had been. Which explains how close the siblings still are, which no amount of bickering, teasing and eye rolling can hide.

Jonathan was crying when he gave Evy away. You can still see it, a bit, on the photos they took just after the wedding. That’s something Rick will never rib him for, especially since he was so damn close himself. He looks goofy as hell in those, like someone just whacked him over the head with a two-by-four and he’s happy about it; Jonathan’s smile is wobbly and his eyes are too bright but his expression spells pride in capital letters a mile wide; and Evy just beams, beautifully confident and perfectly happy, her eyes shining like the sun. Like she’s got all the family she needs right there.

It’s not the earliest picture he has of himself – that’s one of the snapshots taken at a cheap photographer’s in Cairo after they got back from Hamunaptra at Evy’s insistence – but in a way, those wedding pictures mark the start of what he considers to be the best period of his life.

Their first picture of Alex is a colour photograph. His eyes are barely open, two chips of blue in a small, round face surrounded by fuzzy white linen. Most of the other pictures of him – and the entire family – are safely kept in photo albums, but a few hang on the walls. The one Evy likes best, taken when Alex was about five, is in her study, along with a nice portrait of her parents and her favourite wedding picture.

It took Rick a while to get used to the fancy new surroundings, the paintings in particular. Now, though, he likes to look at the portraits from fifty or a hundred years ago and look for clues that his wife and his son are there, somewhere, in the shape of these people’s eyes, their chins, or a distinctive upturn of their mouths.

Besides, the family paintings are for decoration, but the photos are a nice reminder that this old, enormous house, so full of memories, still has room for some more to be made.

**Author's Note:**

> This came from two things: wanting to develop my O'Connell-Carnahan family headcanons, and a self-imposed one-word prompt "pictures". It's short and a bit rambling, but I hope it's a nice little read anyway.
> 
> (I'm belphegor1982 on Tumblr if you want to drop by and chat about the _Mummy_ series!)


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